Martin's daughter's pocket digital camera broke again not long after the warranty expired. Picking and buying a new one was tricky. Last July I wrote about my teenage daughter’s saga of getting a Kodak digital camera repaired. There were several lessons from that experience: Don’t get a digital camera wet in the first place; service takes a long time; service costs almost as much as a new camera; and just because a battery can go into the socket two ways doesn’t mean that both ways will work. The one good thing about the process was that the camera was warranted for six months after the repair.I think the camera knew that the six months was already up when it decided to drop horizontal lines from still images the other day. Although my daughter was attached to the camera, she recognized that it wasn’t very reliable, had a long shutter lag, and that it wouldn’t make sense to have it repaired again.I handed her David Pogue’s fine and easily understandable book “Digital Photography: The Missing Manual,” and she went on from there to read David’s December camera roundup in the New York Times. I also posted a capsule of the situation on Twitter. From the two Pogue sources, she concluded that she wanted to replace her broken Kodak EasyShare with either a Canon PowerShot or a Fujifilm pocket camera. Meanwhile, Pogue himself had responded on Twitter that any new PowerShot model would do. My daughter and I both looked at price comparison sites and Canon’s own site for technical information. We found out that the new PowerShot SD1200 IS model is almost the same as the older SD1100 IS; the new camera has 10 megapixels, a slightly bigger sensor, and more body colors; the old one has 8 megapixels, which is plenty, and is available at a discount.We found several sites that offered the camera at really steep discounts, but when I searched for the company names followed by “complaints” I found out that they are well-known scammers that routinely advertise low prices and then either bait-and-switch the consumer or force the consumer to buy additional, heavily marked-up items before they will ship the product.We ended up ordering a Canon PowerShot SD1100 digital camera from Abe’s of Maine. Abe’s is now in Edison, N.J., but that’s OK; they have a good reputation, and they really did start in Old Orchard Beach, Me. Wish my daughter luck: it’s time for her digital camera karma to change for the better. Software Development